Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in History

Anger now dominates American politics. It wasn’t always so. Both the left and right now summon anger as the main way to motivate their supporters. Post-election, both sides became even more indignant. The left accuses the right of “insurrection.” The right accuses the left of fraud. This is a book about how we got here―about how America changed from a nation that could be roused to anger but preferred self-control, to a nation permanently dialed to eleven.

William C. Davis, one of America’s best Civil War historians, here offers a definitive portrait of the Confederacy unlike any that has come before. Drawing on decades of writing and research among an unprecedented number of archives, Look Away! tells the story of the Confederate States of America not simply as a military saga (although it is that), but rather as a full portrait of a society and incipient nation.

When did “parenting” become a verb? Why is it so hard to parent, and so rife with the possibility of failure? Sitcom families of the past—the Cleavers, the Bradys, the Conners—didn’t seem to lose any sleep about their parenting methods. Today, parents are likely to be up late, doomscrolling on parenting websites. In Long Days, Short Years, Andrew Bomback—physician, writer, and father of three young children—looks at why it can be so much fun to be a parent but, at the same time, so frustrating and difficult to parent.

In the middle of the Great Depression, Montana native Julia Bennett arrived in New York City with no money and an audacious business plan: to identify and visit easterners who could afford to spend their summers at her brand new dude ranch near Ennis, Montana. Julia, a big-game hunter whom friends described as “a clever shot with both rifle and shotgun,” flouted gender conventions to build guest ranches in Montana and Arizona that attracted world-renowned entertainers and artists.

The fascinating history of American bookishness as told through the sale of Charles Lamb’s library in 1848.

Ward McAllister lived in the mid-to-late nineteenth-century USA. This audiobook encompasses his commentary on the parties held by the elite in the USA and Europe during that time. Well-connected and well-traveled, McAllister describes the habits, trends, and wealth of the upper classes of society. As the author testifies, it was a time of transformative, unprecedented extravagance through the emergence of new technology and new prosperity.

Attempting to make sense of the incredible upheaval of 2020—from the devastating impact of COVID-19 to the sudden loss of his father—Edoardo Nesi considers the changing global economy and its effect on our lives. He shares the stories of Alberto Magelli, a small textile entrepreneur; Livia Firth, a prominent advocate for sustainability; Elisa Martelli, a young Sangiovese winemaker; Enrico Giovannini, a leading economist and statistician; Rino Pratesi, a proud butcher from the heart of Tuscany; and more.

This portrait of Mari Sandoz’s pioneer father grew out of “the silent hours of listening behind the stove or the wood box, when it was assumed, of course, that I was asleep in bed. So it was that I heard the accounts of the hunts,” Sandoz recalls. “Of the fights with the cattlemen and the sheepmen, of the tragic scarcity of women, when a man had to ‘marry anything that got off the train,’ of the droughts, the storms, the wind and isolation. But the most impressive stories were those told to me by Old Jules himself.”

The Trump administration’s “Peace to Prosperity” vision for the Middle East was unveiled on January 28, 2020. What followed over the next eleven months was one of the most fascinating and consequential periods of US foreign policy in a generation, leading to five normalization agreements between Israel and Muslim states. The Abraham Accords achieved what had seemed impossible for decades and set the Middle East on a trajectory toward a broad regional peace.

In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the US from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders.

In current debates about globalization, open and borderless elites are often set in opposition to the immobile and protectionist working classes. This view obscures a major historical fact: for around a century—from the 1860s to the 1970s—worker movements were at the cutting edge of internationalism. The creation in London of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864 was a turning point. In this urgent, engaging work, historian Nicolas Delalande explores how international worker solidarity developed.

Mari N. Crabtree traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left in its wake. African American victims and survivors had to find a way to live through and beyond the horrors of lynching. Crabtree offers a theory of African American collective trauma and memory rooted in a strategy for “working through” trauma that has long existed within the African American cultural tradition: the ironic spirit of the blues sensibility—a spirit of misdirection and cunning that blends joy and pain.

Americans have lost faith in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an institution they once regarded as the world’s greatest law-enforcement agency. Thomas Baker spent many years with the FBI and is deeply troubled by this loss of faith. Specific lapses have come to light and each is thoroughly discussed in this book: Why did they happen? What changed? The answer begins days after the 9/11 attacks when the FBI underwent a significant change in culture.

No American president has enjoyed as intimate a relationship with the soldiers in his army as did the man they called “Father Abraham.” In Lincoln’s Men, historian William C. Davis draws on thousands of unpublished letters and diaries—the voices of the volunteers—to tell the hidden story of how a new and untested president became “Father” throughout both the army and the North as a whole. Lincoln’s Men casts a new light on our most famous president and on America’s revolution—on our country’s father and its rebirth.

Between 1920 and 1950, America saw an unprecedented expansion of wealth and power underwritten by technological innovation, cultural confidence, and victory in war. American elites won World War II, rebuilt the world order with America at its head, inaugurated the jet age, and put a man on the moon. The boom led to a larger, richer middle class that confirmed America’s best ideals. By the early 1970s, that ended. American elites have captured a disproportionate share of the social and economic rewards over the last fifty years.

At thirty-five, Elsie Robinson feared she’d lost it all. Reeling from a divorce in 1917, she had no means to support herself and her chronically ill son. She dreamed of becoming a writer and was willing to sacrifice everything for this goal, even swinging a pickax in a gold mine to pay the bills. When the mine shut down, she moved to the Bay Area, where she barged into the offices of the Oakland Tribune and was hired on the spot. She went on to become a nationally syndicated columnist and household name whose column ran for over thirty years and garnered fifty million readers.

It is often said that the special bond between Britain and the United States was forged in war between President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. But the closer link in many ways was that between Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, since it existed both in wartime and again in very different circumstances. In other words, theirs was a much longer relationship than that between President Roosevelt and Churchill, and spanning peace as well as war. And it was the Eisenhower and Churchill relationship that essentially created the world order that lasted down until current times.

Before the cyber age, foreign interference in Western democratic politics played out in a comparatively narrow arena. The explosive expansion of cyberspace has radically altered this situation. The hacking activities of Russian military agents in the 2016 US presidential election and other major incidents demonstrate the magnitude of the contemporary problem. This is a struggle that the West is losing. Lucas Kello delves into recent history to reveal the failures of present policy in preventing and punishing cyberattacks and other forms of technological aggression.

Our Flag Was Still There details the improbable two-hundred-year journey of the original Star-Spangled Banner—from Fort McHenry in 1814, when Francis Scott Key first saw it, to the Smithsonian—and the enduring family who defended, kept, hid, and ultimately donated the most famous flag in American history. Tom McMillan tells a story as no one has before. Digging deep into the archives of Fort McHenry and the Smithsonian, McMillan follows the flag on an often-perilous journey through three centuries.

In this biography of Maimonides, the medieval philosopher, physician, and religious thinker, Alberto Manguel examines the question of his universal appeal. Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides (1138–1204), was born in Córdoba, Spain. The gifted son of a judge and mathematician, Maimonides fled Córdoba with his family when he was thirteen due to Almohad persecution of all non-Islamic faiths. Forced into a long exile, the family spent a decade in Spain before settling in Morocco. From there, Maimonides traveled to Palestine and Egypt, where he died at Saladin’s court.